A family of my friends offered me a day in the mountains that I duly and eagerly accepted for two reasons. Firstly, hill-walking is my preferred outdoor activity and way of spending time off. Secondly, we were to go to the area where my love of hill-walking had started, and where I had developed all the essential skills required. So, going down to the town of Szklarska Poręba was inevitably a journey down the memory lane.
We left our car parked and hit the trail at about 8:30 am after a bit over 2-hour long journey. It was quite warm, hazy and dry – the latter was really welcome. A wide forest track was gradually climbing up – a pretty good warm-up before a steeper, narrower and winding section. The latter looked like the bottom of a stream. Additionally some part of it were lined with timber planks, now showing signs of substantial wear and tear. After quite a while we came out onto a wide, well-maintained, relatively steep dirt road. It led us up to a flatter section, adorned with a tall rocky outcrop. Further up the track we arrived at a mountain hut, our first planned break. The hut is in fact more a hostel and restaurant than a hut. We had some local, Czech beer (nice and cold) and I had fried eggs with sausages. This kind of food always tastes better than at home, after having made some climbing or walking.
That place was also a spot where we were to decide our next step. The preferred option was following the green trail along the bottom of the Snowy Corries. Unfortunately, the trail was closed due to some nature preservation project. So we decided to follow the yellow trail up towards the ridge, and from there to go along the top of the corries. The stone-paved path traversed the slope; it was relatively easy to tackle, and fairly soon we reached the top of the ridge and a wide dirt road running along it. As it wasn’t far away we decided to visit the official source of the river Elbe, called Laba by the Czechs. We had to cross the border between Poland and the Czech Republic, which is permitted as both countries are members of the Schengen agreement. It was a pleasant walk along the wide, but pretty busy with human traffic dirt road. We passed by a rocky outcrop which marks the summit of Łabski Szczyt; tourists are not allowed to climb it, though well visible paths showed there had been many ignoring it.
The source of the Elbe was surrounded by a low concrete circle, filled with water, stones at the bottom and some coins dropped by the visitors. There was a low wall nearby full of the coat of arms of the towns and cities the river Elbe flows through (that’s my educated guess). On the opposite side there was a wooden sculpture symbolically depicting the river as a female. The whole place was full of people of all ages and of a few different languages. After a break we moved back and went towards the radio & TV relay station of a very distinctive appearance, perching above the Snowy Corries.
As the weather remained pleasant and we were walking across a vast, quite flat plateau, we reach the station in no time, without noticing the distance we had covered. The station is not accessible to tourists, but its location and dominance in the skyline is the magnet drawing people. And there were many of them. One group of schoolchildren was particularly loud, noisy and unaware of others around them. On two occasions I avoided being trampled over only because I was significantly taller than them. Nonetheless the views down the corries were great. And when eventually the group, now walking a bit ahead of us chose a different route than ours, we sighed with great relief.
Our route led us downhill, quite steeply at times, along various types of paths. That led us into the woods, and further down we turned left into a path that would eventually led us back to the same mountain hut we had visited earlier on. Our plan was to stop there, have another, different beer, and to decide the final stretch of our day out. The path was narrow and winding, sometimes quite challenging because of the roots, stones and other obstacles we had to tackle. Otherwise this part of the walk was uneventful, except of a couple of thunders rumbling in the distance. The air was stifle, and eventually we came out of the woods near the hut pretty sweaty.
There was noticed the hut was virtually besieged by the tourists. A quick look inside left no doubts that buying beer would require spending about an hour in the queue. That was out of the question. Instead we had some of our food and drinks outside the hut, and after some deliberations decided to go back to our car, taking a different route than in the morning, though running down pretty much parallel. It ran rather steeply down in the form of a rather rugged path, soon turned into a wider track, massively run down and damaged by forestry operations. Tackling it was tiresome and required a lot of attention. We were really happy to see a solid, even and flat wide forest track at the end of that section. From there we walked along the track back to the same one we had taken in the morning and after a quarter of an hour we returned to our car, just when it was beginning to rain.
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